Previous stop: Krakow!

Fyi, Warsaw got a bit heavy, though I’m not going into detail about it.

The Polish countryside: farms.

Our tourist stop for the day was a monastery named Jasna Góra, where there is an icon of the Black Madonna (not actually painted to be black either in pigmentation or ethnicity, just painted on elm wood or something which turned black with age). This is the passage up to the main gate; it was very well fortified.

There were dozens, dozens of big tour buses of pilgrims/tourists. We were just another bunch on the pile. Too many people.

The main entrance to the main church was actually not that grandiose, but it had two sundials.

Along the fortifications you could look out to see these really big Stations of the Cross. There was also another statue of JP2.

Local resident posed for me.

I wonder what this was originally for? Now it has cafés and gift shops.

The gift shops HAD NO POSTCARDS OF THE ORGAN so I went back in and took my own because how can you leave out one of the most important bits of a church??????? They were holding about 5 different Masses all over the monastery but the one in the main sanctuary was finished so I wasn’t being disruptive, I promise. The organist was just noodling around with a bunch of postludey things.

Arriving into Warsaw, the clouds and light were spectacular.

I found this contrast between the old Communist building, the bright graffiti, and the modern building to be quite striking.

Then we got dropped off at the wrong hotel, so our very patient and obliging Lithuanian bus driver Igor came back to get us and take us to the right hotel. But our actual hotel was really nice! I had a stove and a kitchen sink and everything! I didn’t use it, but I could have.

Although I did make one mishap… I went to a corner store and bought a really cheap loaf of bread and some cheese. The bread turned out to be beer bread, and I hated it so much I chucked it two days later instead of forcing it into terrible sandwiches (the cheese wasn’t much better).

The next day we drove into town, past the Chinese embassy (which had a massive park around it) and finally arrived here, starting with the Krasinski Palace on one side of the street and the Supreme Court on the other.

Supreme Court very modern.

Polish resistance monument. They had to be very clever and stealthy, using the sewers to get around, stealing equipment from the Germans, and it was still a hopeless fight that they fought anyway. That fellow was our tour guide and he had a lot of photographs of how the city used to look, either before the war or during the war.

Tiny decor on a building!

The old city was a walled city, and the wall is still there.

A metal model of the city, and a photograph showing how it was before the war. They don’t match exactly, so I think they restored it to even earlier than that? Not sure, don’t remember.

Statue of Saint King Kasimir, I think.

There was a Chopin concert advertised at this house, but I didn’t go to it because I went to two Chopin concerts at another house.

I love how well the city has been restored! (apparently it was a flattened pile of rubble after the war, because they resisted so fiercely.) It’s been restored so well it’s been afforded the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation, even though it’s not exactly original. But I can kind of get the sense of what it might have been like to live here in the 18-19th centuries, I feel.

Apparently if you make a wish and then walk around this bell four times, your wish will come true. : P

Flowers and ivy are really pretty.

A window on the side of the cathedral.

The resistance blew up a tank, and one of the treads got lodged in the cathedral, so they left it there as a memorial when they rebuilt it.

They restored the place really well.

Main market square.

Tourist junk and cafés everywhere you look!

Apparently this mermaid was captured by some merchants and when she was freed she vowed to protect the city. But like first of all – Warsaw is landlocked, there’s just a river running through it. Second of all, girl get real, you couldn’t handle some merchants, how you gonna protect a whole city?

The Warsaw Barbican

Marie Curie’s birthplace!

Part of the ‘new’ old city.

Plaque showing the extent of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The plaque below the plaque, explaining.

The memorial at the former location of the train station where the death trains were loaded.

One of the few remaining pieces of the ghetto wall.

The remains of one of the resistance bunkers.

Can’t read this without wanting to cry.

The big memorial in front of the Jewish museum.

TO LIGHTER MATTERS: this ice cream cost about 7 złoty and was my dinner in the half-hour before the first Chopin concert.

I wandered around the old city a little bit while eating it.

Then I went to two concerts; the first one I had to pay for, but the second was free (and put on by the “the presence of Japanese tradition in contemporary Polish art” association…??? the program is in Polish so I’m not sure). The pianists were very good, but you know what’s interesting is I think I understand Chopin’s music a little better now that I’ve been in Poland, even if it’s changed since his day.

After the concerts, I went for a walk along the dry moat and wall.

The city hall/castle/palace. In the tour guide’s pictures, it was a pile of bricks after the war. The whole place was a pile of bricks. It’s amazing what they did with it.

There were several buskers, including fire spinners (not shown) in the square here at dusk.

And it’s right over a busy highway.

 

Next stop: Vilnius!